Overview of the activities of the Vision, Image Processing and Sound (VIPS) laboratory,
University of Verona

Abstract

In the talk, a general overview of the activities carried out at the
Vision, Image Processing and Sound (VIPS) laboratory (University of
Verona, Italy), and the main research projects in which it is involved
will be described.
Then, the presentation will focus on a work titled:

Automatic Environment Reconstruction from Multiple 3D Acoustic Images
A technique for three-dimensional reconstruction of an underwater
environment from multiple range images acquired by an acoustic camera will
be presented.
Due to the narrow field of view and the absence of control of the sensor
position, no information is available about the degree of overlapping
between the range images; further, speckle noise and low resolution make
more difficult the registration process.
In this context, we propose a preprocessing method which gives a coarse
alignment of range images prior to the application of an Iterative Closest
Point (ICP)-based algorithm for the accurate registration of views pairs.
The pre-alignment is based on the matching between the three-dimensional
skeletons extracted from the images. A comparative analysis is presented
where our method is compared with classic ICP, and with a technique based
on
principal components.

This work is part of an EC project whose final goal is the improvement of
the understanding of a human operator driving an underwater remotely
operated vehicle (ROV) floating around an offshore structure.